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The 1st International Symposium on the Sociology of Words, 1 - 2 December 2011, will be hosted by the English Department, La Merced Campus, Universidad de Murcia (Spain), and organized by the research groups LACELL (www.um.es/grupolacell), headed by Professor Aquilino Sánchez, and LEXICOM (www.lexicom.es), headed by Professor Ricardo Mairal, from UNED. Both groups have undertaken and are currently developing research projects closely related to the main topic of the symposium.

In addition to plenary lectures, papers and round-table talks, which will be given in English, some 10-minute contributions, either in English or in Spanish, are planned. Furthermore, posters will be displayed during the second day of the symposium.

This symposium was born out of the need to gather and put together specialists' research on the interface between lexical meaning and lexical combinatorics, so that studies currently undertaken in the field may become widely known as well as being discussed by international experts; therefore, we hope that research and studies on lexical meaning will take root and expand. Accordingly, the Symposium is intended as a forum for the presentation, discussion, debate and development of a leading but still not well-known line of research.

The symposium will host two kinds of participants:

a) Invited participants (plenary talks, plenary papers and round tables). These participants -who will cover 15 different sessions to be attended by all the registered participants- have been selected and invited by the Organizing Committee due to their status as experts in each one of the three specific topics around which the symposium has been structured.

b) The number of regular participants are (i) those registered to attend the symposium, and (ii) those registered as authors of a poster or short communication, with the right to attend and participate in all the plenary sessions. The number of regular participants will be limited to 100. Posters and short papers will be selected among the entire proposals received, on the basis of their quality and relevance regarding the topic of the symposium.

The official language of the Symposium will be English. Posters and short papers may be written and presented in either English or Spanish. Short papers will take 10 minutes.

The symposium will revolve around three interconnected and interdependent axes: